Nearly 25 million people suffer from end-stage lung disease in the United States alone, with a staggering ˜400,000 patients dying each year. Lung transplantation, the only definitive treatment for these patients, remains hampered by a severe shortage of donor organs, to the extent that only one out of four patients waiting for a lung undergoes transplantation. A variety of methods and systems are known for performing transplantation of lungs. However, lungs with insufficient gas exchange capacity are not suitable for transplant, resulting in a substantial reduction in the potential donor pool and a shortage of suitable donor lungs.
Conventional methods do not exist for recovering the functionality of lungs in order to render otherwise non-viable lungs suitable for successful transplantation. There thus remains a need for a method and system for recovering the functionality of lungs rejected for transplantation based on insufficient gas exchange capability or other conditions rendering non-viable lungs for transplantation.